Sydney Dance Company reveals its 45th anniversary season

ABC Arts

The Sydney Dance Company has commissioned eight new contemporary dance pieces for its 2014 season, including work by respected choreographer Gideon Obarzanek.

Sydney Dance Company’s artistic director Rafael Bonachela has enticed Gideon Obarzanek, one of the leading figures in Australian contemporary dance, back to choreography for the company’s 45th anniversary season.

In 2008, at the age of 42, Obarzanek told The Australian’s Matthew Westwood that he was approaching an “unfashionable age for a choreographer”. Fortunately the trend seems to have changed.

SDC will open in 2014 with a power packed triple bill called Interplay featuring Italian choreographer Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models, a new Bach-inspired work by Bonachela and an expansive work for the entire company by Obarzanek.

Since leaving his role as artistic director of Chunky Move, the dance company Obarzanek founded in 1995, the choreographer and former dancer has been experimenting with other art forms. He’s dabbled in film, collaborating with Matthew Bate on the 30-minute docudrama I Want To Dance Better At Parties, which is having its world premiere at the 2013 Adelaide Film Festival in October, and he was also awarded a $100,000 Creative Australia fellowship. In 2010 Obarzanek returned to the stage for the first time in a decade for Faker, a sparse solo performance in stark contrast to the high octane technologically-rich shows that cemented Chunky Move’s international reputation.

Bonachela, now heading into his fifth year with the SDC, has marked his tenure with a series of collaborations with designers, composers, musicians such as Sarah Blasko and Katie Noonan, and other choreographers including Israeli Emanuel Gat.

In 2014, the Company will commission eight new contemporary dance pieces, and will work with four yet-to-be-named emerging choreographers for the November New Breed season.

Bonachela says the 2014 program will “give audiences a taste of the contemporary and the now from a diverse range of artistic voices around the country and the world.”

The company will tour its award-winning production 2 One Another to Queensland and Western Australia in 2014. Brisbane will also have the opportunity to see the Queensland Symphony Orchestra play alongside the SDC and Katie Noonan in Les Illuminations.

“It’s great when so much of the Australian population gets to engage with contemporary dance,” says Bonachela.

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